The Hundred Year Lie

The Hundred Year Lie, How Food & Medicine are Destroying Your Health (published 2006) was written by Randall Fitzgerald, a former investigative reporter.
I was looking up nutrition in the library and came across this book. I knew a lot of the processed foods I ate were not healthy, but I didn't know the extent of the damage until reading this book. This was the final catalyst for me to start living healthier. I know it's going to be a slow, difficult change, but I'm going to take it one step at a time. I'm currently resisting the temptation to throw everything in my house away and start from scratch.
Here are a few facts and studies from the book to get you started. However, the book is not all doom and gloom...in the final chapters, Fitzgerald writes about what you can do and detoxing your body.

**In the last decade, children being born with both male and female sex organs has tripled.

**The U.S. spends more than twice as much on health care than any other industrialized nation. (When's the last time your doctor asked about your nutrition when you told him/her the ailment? Instead, most prescribe synthetic medicines with unknown side effects.)

**Battling terminal brain tumors and the breakdown of her body due to chronic disease, Bonnie Lovett stunned the National Institute of Health and experienced complete disease regression that left her with no physical deformities. Her secret? Acting on the knowledge that the Synthetics belief System (that medicine, chemo, and radiation were the answers) was ruining her life.

**There are over 100,000 chemicals in use today. Most of them have not been tested for toxicity in humans, either alone or in combination with other chemicals. (Synergies is the way different chemicals react together. With so many combinations of chemicals in our bodies right now, there is no telling how they will react and the problems they will cause.)

**A study from the science journal, Public Health, described in 2004 how the incidence of death from brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and motor neurone disorders, was found to have tripled in nine Western countries, including the U.S., during the period 1974 to 1997. The most likely causes researchers identified were exposure to pesticides sprayed on crops, synthetic chemicals from the processed foods that we consume, and industrial chemicals used in almost every aspect of our modern lives

**In California, state environmental officials discovered that 60 percent of the rivers and streams contained high levels of prozac, ritalin, and antibiotics.

**Medical researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York found an average of 91 industrial compounds, pollutants, and other synthetic chemicals in the blood and urine of nine volunteers who had no occupational or geographical connection to these chemicals or where they are manufactured. More than half of these chemicals are known to be responsible for birth defects, or cancer, or brain and nervous system disorders in humans.

**Britain's Daily Mail reports on a new study showing that food additives are a cause of hyperactivity in children.

**Our pets suffer too: Dogs and cats fed a processed foods diet suffer similar ailments as humans who consume chemical food additives.